“Those that git a Living without bodily Labour,” wrote Manning, whose own writings were inspired by his reading of Benjamin Lincoln’s “Free Republican” essays, were “the merchant, phisition, lawyer & divine, the philosipher and school master, the Judicial & Executive Officers, & many others.” These orders of men were generally “so rich that they can live without Labour.” Once these gentry had attained their life of “ease & rest” that “at once creates a sense of superiority,” wrote Manning, in phonetic prose that was real and not some gentleman’s satiric ploy, they tended to “asotiate together and look down with two much contempt on those that labour.” Although “the hole of them do not amount to one eighth part of the people,” these gentry had the “spare time” and the “arts & skeems” to combine and consult with one another. They had the power to control the electorate and the government “in a veriaty of ways.” Some voters they flattered “by promise of favors, such as being customers to them, or helping them out of debt, or other difficultyes; or help them to a good bargain, or treet them or trust them, or lend them money, or even give them a little money”—anything or everything if only “they will vote for such & such a man.” Other voters the gentry threatened: “‘if you don’t vote for such & such a man,’ or ‘if you do’ and, ‘you shall pay me what you owe me,’ or ‘I will sew you’—‘I will turne you out of my house’ or ‘off of my farm’—‘I wont be your customer any longer.’ . . . All these things have bin practised & may be again.” This was how the “few” exerted influence over the many.15
Although Adams never read Manning’s unpublished essays, he was equally concerned with this age-old distinction between those who worked for a living and those who did not. As he said in 1790, “the great question will forever remain, who shall work? ” Not everyone could be idle, said Adams; not everyone could be a gentleman. “Leisure for study must ever be the portion of a few. The number employed in government, must forever be very small.” Adams was so keen on this point of gentlemen and high public officials not being involved in any sort of demeaning manual labor that on a voyage to Europe, he—much to the surprise of foreign observers—“scorned working at the pump, to which all the other passengers submitted in order to obviate the imminent danger of sinking, arguing that it was not befitting a person who had public status in Europe.” To risk drowning rather than to lose one’s honor as a gentleman who was not supposed to engage in physical labor tells us just how important this distinction was to Adams.16
At the same time Adams had no desire to follow Aristotle and the other ancients in excluding working people from citizenship. Not only was Aristotle’s antique view “the most unphilosophical, the most inhuman and cruel that can be conceived,” but it misjudged the capacities of ordinary people. “The meanest understanding,” said Adams, “is equal to the duty of saying who is the man in his neighborhood whom he most esteems, and loves best, for his knowledge, integrity, and benevolence.” Moreover, the understandings of husbandmen, minor merchants, shopkeepers, mechanics, and other middling people were not always the meanest. From among them often arose “the most splendid geniuses, the most active and benevolent dispositions, and the most undaunted bravery.” He ought to know; he had once been one of them.17
• • •
THIS DISTINCTION BETWEEN those who worked and those who did not was important to Jefferson too, but for different reasons. When he thought about the issue of work and leisure, he focused on the institution of slavery. In his indictment of slavery in his Notes on the State of Virginia, he mentioned the “miserable condition” of the slaves, but he was far more interested in the evils that slavery inflicted upon the manners of the slaveholders themselves. Not only did slavery tend to incite the crudest passions among the slaveholders, breed despotic attitudes, and undermine their morals, but “their industry also is destroyed. For in a warm climate no man will labour for himself who can make another labour for him.” Only a few “proprietors of slaves” were “ever seen to labour.”18
This was alarming to Jefferson not because aristocratic planters like him with hundreds of slaves were expected to engage in bodily labor, but because many ordinary farmers who might own only a few slaves (or owned none but wished to possess some) inevitably developed a contempt for work, which in turn encouraged their indolence. Jefferson, of course, hoped that “the mass of cultivators” would not become slaveholders but instead look “to their own soil and industry” for their subsistence. But the southern culture of slavery with its scorn for labor was powerful and pervasive. As many southerners pointed out, laziness had become the scourge of the South and a danger to its social health.19
In 1792 David Rice, a courageous Virginia-born Presbyterian minister in Kentucky, condemned slavery for just this reason—for sapping the moral foundations of the society. “Slavery,” Rice declared, “produces idleness; and idleness is the nurse of vice. A vicious commonwealth is a building erected on quick-sand, the inhabitants of which can never abide in safety.” When slavery becomes common, said Rice, who tried but failed to get an antislavery article inserted into Kentucky’s constitution, it makes industriousness shameful. “To labour is to slave; to work is to work like a Negro; and this is disgraceful; it levels us with the meanest of the species; it sits hard upon the mind; it cannot be patiently borne.” As a result, southern youth were “tempted to idleness, and drawn into other vices; they see no other way to keep their credit, and acquire some little importance.”20 Jefferson claimed over and over that “the cultivators of the earth” were the “most vigorous, most independent, the most virtuous” citizens.21 But, in the 1780s at least, he shared a great deal of the Reverend Rice’s sense that slavery and its promotion of idleness threatened the well-being of southern society.
As a slaveholder Jefferson naturally saw himself as a leisured aristocrat, but unlike most of his fellow southern planters, he had no contempt for those who worked. When he eventually realized that much of his political support in the North came from common people who lived by manual labor and not by their wits, he came to recognize that work was not something fit only for slaves. One of the reasons he disliked cities was because they were places where men sought “to live by their heads rather than their hands.”22
Nevertheless, slavery and its effect on work were subjects too sensitive for Jefferson to dwell on. Consequently, he never had the same intense preoccupation that Adams had with the social division between a leisured aristocracy and the common people who labored for a living. For Adams, no issue was more important, because this division lay at the heart of his entire understanding of society and politics.
• • •
IN ADAMS’S ANALYSIS, THE SOURCES of the leisured gentry’s separation from the laboring commoners were many and diverse, but slavery was not one of them. Wealth, he said, was crucially important in distinguishing one person from another. But merit and talent as well as service in the army or government could also earn “the confidence and affection of their fellow citizens to such a degree” that their advice and influence would be respected. Adams undoubtedly assumed he was among this group.
Birth was also important in distinguishing one person from another. Some individuals inherited position and privilege from their families. It was obvious, said Adams, that “the children of illustrious families have generally greater advantages of education, and earlier opportunities to be acquainted with public characters, and informed of public affairs, than those of meaner ones, or even those in middle life.” Such families were very influential and were usually venerated and respected by the general public from generation to generation simply for their name—something that Adams, in 1787 at least, obviously scorned. Despite the importance of ancestry, however, in the end he believed that wealth always had “more influence than birth.”
Then there were the liberally educated—“men of letters, men of the learned professions, and others”—who through “acquaintance, conversation, and civilities” were usually
connected with the wealthy aristocracy. Alas, too many of these learned sort—“among the wisest people who live”—tended to get caught up in excessive admiration and respect for the wealthy aristocracy. Adams, who always valued his independence, clearly did not count himself among those who venerated the rich and wellborn.
Adams spent so much time describing the sources of this natural aristocracy because, like William Manning, he feared their “natural and inevitable influence in society.” No doubt the aristocratic few contained “the greatest collection of virtues and abilities in a free government.” They could become the “glory of the nation” and “the greatest blessing of society,” but only if they were controlled and institutionalized—as he put it, only if they were “judiciously managed in the constitution.” This is why he wanted to ostracize the aristocrats in a separate branch of the legislature that was balanced by a strong executive. Unless this was done, they were “always the most dangerous” order in the society; indeed, unless they were segregated in senates and checked by the executive, they never failed “to be the destruction of the commonwealth.”23
Nothing was more certain to Adams than the existence of this sort of inequality in all societies at all times. These differences among people, he said, were “not peculiar to any age”; they were “common to every people, and can never be altered by any, because they are founded in the constitution of nature.”24 No American revolutionary leader talked quite this way, and none offered a more direct challenge to the assertion in the Declaration of Independence that all men were created equal.
Adams, in other words, was defying the Enlightenment dream that only cultivation and different opportunities for education separated one person from another. When in 1776 Jefferson declared that all men were created equal he was not simply saying that all had equal rights under the law. Since many Englishmen believed in equality under the law, such an idea would never have been radical. Instead, he was claiming that all men (in his case at least, all white men) were born with equal blank slates and that the natural and cultural environments inscribing these blank slates through time by themselves created the obvious differences that separated one person from another. When this enlightened assumption was coupled with the power of education, everyone had an equal opportunity to become somebody of distinction.
What made Adams’s position in 1787 so unusual, so reactionary, was his denial of this optimistic assumption of 1776, which he himself had once taken so seriously. Although he had as early as 1766 declared that all men were born equal, he had changed his mind. Experience had convinced him of the opposite. All men, he now contended, were born decidedly unequal. Contrary to what many revolutionaries believed in 1776, people did not begin the race of life from the same starting point. At birth some were more intelligent, some were more handsome, and some were more wealthy. People were born possessing previously existing natural and cultural privileges. Therefore, the slates with which people began life were not blank but were already marked and engraved. Locke’s white paper was already full of inscriptions. The obvious distinctions that arose in society were inherent in the inequalities of birth. Nature, not nurture, now was what counted. In other words, Adams was reviving the traditional assumptions of the ancien régime, the assumptions about differences of blood and birth that the Revolution presumably had laid to rest.
• • •
ADAMS OFFERED HIS COUNTRYMEN a terrifying picture of themselves. He described the two orders of society—the aristocracy and the commoners—engrossed in relentless struggles for supremacy. People were constantly scrambling for distinction—for wealth, for power, for privilege, for social eminence that they hoped could be passed on to their descendants. Everyone’s desire to get ahead was limitless and all-consuming. Especially powerful were the “aristocratical passions”—avarice, vanity, and ambition. “The love of gold grows faster than the heap of acquisition.” The love of praise was so great that “man is miserable every moment when he does not snuff the incense.” As for ambition, it was voracious; it “strengthens at every advance, and at last takes possession of the whole soul so absolutely, that a man sees nothing in the world of importance to others or himself, but in his object.”25
The numerous commoners and middling sorts, driven by the most ambitious, always attempted to ruin and displace the aristocratic leaders they envied and hated. Those in particular “whose fortunes, families, and merits in the acknowledged judgment of all” seemed closest to those at the top “will be much disposed to claim the first place as their own right.”26 Those few who struggled to the top of this anxiety-ridden society would seek only to stabilize and aggrandize their superior position by trying to influence or oppress the many below them who had been left behind. Hence America, like every society, had been and would continue to be ridden by this basic social conflict, its members impelled by a fundamental desire for distinction that was rooted in human nature. Anyone, said Adams, who didn’t agree with his social analysis was simply denying reality.
Jefferson never saw society in the way Adams did. He took his leisured gentry status for granted; he never felt threatened by ambitious and scrambling middling sorts trying to displace him. Indeed, his Virginia had very few middling sorts anyhow—very few manufacturers, artisans, tradesmen, clerks, and petty merchants—and he celebrated their absence. People who were not farmers were detrimental to the society. He considered “the class of artificers as the panders of vice and the instruments by which the liberty of a country are generally overturned.”27
• • •
SINCE ADAMS’S SOCIAL ANALYSIS was designed to create a science of politics that was applicable to all peoples at all times, his conclusion in the Defence was obvious. America was essentially no different from Europe. There was, said Adams, “no special providence for Americans, and their nature is the same with that of others.” With all the high hopes of 1776 dissipating, Adams faced the formidable task of persuading his countrymen that they were, after all, “like all other people, and shall do like other nations.” In all of American history, no political leader of Adams’s stature, and certainly no president, has ever so emphatically denied the belief in American exceptionalism.28
Adams’s description of his society as one inevitably divided in two and tortured by jealousy, envy, and resentment was so dark and so grim that no political solution could seem possible. But Adams had one: “Orders of men, watching and balancing each other, are the only security; power must be opposed to power and interest to interest.”29 A balanced constitution like that of England was the solution: the common and middling people had to be confined to the lower houses of the legislatures and the gentry-aristocrats had to be ostracized in the upper houses, with the balance maintained by a strong and independent executive.
The powerful executive was crucial to his system—the very part of government Jefferson most feared. “If there is one certain truth to be collected from the history of all ages,” said Adams, “it is this: that the people’s rights and liberties, and the democratical mixture in a constitution, can never be preserved without a strong executive.” Only an alliance between the first magistrate and the common people was capable of putting down the cunning and craftiness of a rapacious aristocracy. “What is the whole history of the barons wars but one demonstration of this truth? What are all the standing armies in Europe, but another? These were all given to the kings by the people, to defend them against aristocracies.” It was obvious to Adams that the executive power, by whatever name it might be called, was “the natural friend of the people, and the only defence which they or their representatives can have against the avarice and ambition of the rich and distinguished citizens.”30
A bicameral legislature with a strong executive: this was Adams’s constitutional remedy for the ferocious social struggle he had laid out in such terrifying detail in his Defence, a remedy that seems disproportionate to the severity of the social scramble he had depicted. Adams never explained how the ar
istocrats would remain segregated in the senates, or how such powerful elites could be kept from entering or influencing politics in the lower houses, or how the common people, even in alliance with the executive, would ever be able to control the influence of such wealthy and formidable men. Yet however inadequate his constitutional remedy, Adams at least had accurately diagnosed the problem of social inequality that was plaguing American politics in the 1780s; it was one that would continue to plague the nation that prided itself on its equality.
• • •
WITH HIS USUAL GOOD MANNERS, Jefferson told Adams that he had read the volume of the Defence Adams had sent him “with infinite satisfaction and improvement. It’s learning and it’s good sense,” he said, “will I hope make it an institute for our politicians, old as well as young.” He promised to try to get it translated into French, which he ultimately never did, probably because his French liberal friends objected strenuously to Adams’s argument.31
From his favorable comments, it’s clear that Jefferson did not read the book from cover to cover—who could blame him?—for if he had, he would have been deeply disturbed by so much that ran against the grain of his own thinking, indeed, that challenged almost everything he believed. Adams’s dramatic descriptions of his countrymen’s mania for distinctions and luxury, his denial of American equality, his celebration of executive authority, and his assertions that Americans were no different from Europeans—all these strongly voiced opinions expressed in his first volume would surely have shocked and alarmed Jefferson if he had read the book carefully.
Friends Divided Page 25
